Down and dirty in New Jersey

CAMDEN, N.J. — Politics in New Jersey is about as subtle as a fist to the mouth.

And with each passing blow, it's becoming clearer that this year's governor's race is going to be especially brutish — even by Jersey standards.

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Nothing is off the table. Not even Republican Chris Christie's 2002 car accident with a motorcyclist who ended up in a hospital.

“I’m not sure if most of our classrooms have done away with drivers ed, but I think on behalf of our opponent, we should get that back into the curriculum,” said state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, Gov. Jon Corzine’s 74-year old running mate and a lady he calls “the feistiest grandmother I’ve ever met,” at a press conference here Friday.

The event, held in front of an early education center in this blighted city, was ostensibly about education, but what Corzine and Weinberg really want to focus on is raising doubts about Christie, the former U.S. attorney who leads in the polls.

The line got a good laugh from a sympathetic crowd full of local educators, but Weinberg wanted it known she wasn’t just having fun at Christie’s expense.

“Go for it,” Corzine encouraged her.

“You know this is not a teenager we’re talking about,” she added. “He seems to have a set of rules for himself and another one for everyone else.”

With poor approval ratings, a sour economy, fresh examples of Democratic public corruption and a dyspeptic electorate, Corzine has little choice but to use an education press conference to hammer his GOP rival on a seven-year-old traffic wreck. His own path to victory, longtime political observers say and even his own campaign acknowledges, will likely only come by rendering Christie as an unacceptable alternative.

"New Jersey races tend to get intense, and this one is heading there more quickly," said Maggie Moran, Corzine’s campaign manager. "I maintain, though, that the public has a right to know about our opponent's hypocrisy."

In an interview following his appearance here, Corzine himself quickly turned to those contrasts when he’s asked what the campaign will turn on, ticking off Christie’s views on a number of health care-related issues, before touching on his larger message of tying his GOP rival to a national party in a deep-blue presidential state.

“Then there is the overall issue of whether we want to go back to policies that got us into the kind of trouble that this country is in or whether we want to go forward,” Corzine said, getting at a theme that is amplified by signs that feature pictures of Christie and George W. Bush and that are tacked up on telephone poles in this city.

Corzine, a former Wall Street executive and millionaire, spent over $6 million on ads hammering Christie this summer and his campaign estimates that he and the state party will put down over $20 million in the next two months.